May 13, 2007

A more complex Rose Kennedy

"Well, I am just an old-fashioned girl," Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy would say when someone offered a cigarette or a drink. "I don't drink and I don't smoke and I have a lot of children."

12 years after her death, Rose Kennedy's recently released diaries, letters, and personal papers reveal a more complex figure than she sometimes styled herself. An educated, ambitious woman, she struggled to maintain a sense of individuality in a culture that frowned upon independent women, in a family that considered everything a team sport, in which the women were expected to suppress their ambitions for the team.
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Rose Kennedy has been the victim of a kind of affectionate type-casting -- the self-effacing spouse, the proud and grieving mother at the center of, but not quite central to, the iconic family scenes. A face in the frame more than a character in her own right.

Turns out there are a lot of things you don't know about Rose you will learn in a slide gallery that accompanies the piece.
"She was an intellectual, she didn't spare the rod, she played through pain, she was precise with money, she was image conscious, she was a woman of faith, she worried about Jack, she found peace later on in life."